The admission by the current ZESCO board and by extension the top management team that they failed to plan properly and even mis-informed the head of state and the country at large that load shedding has ended should not have ended at mere apologies, but the responsible board members and top management staff should have resigned.
And in the case like this were the responsible board members and top management staff are not honorable enough to offer their resignation, they ought to be fired by their appointing authority. In this case, President Hakainde Hichilema – HH who promised to run a merit based governments and is the appointing authority should step in and relieve the responsible ZESCO board members and management staff.
We do appreciate that Job opportunities are hard to come by in Zambia, but if you look at how many jobs that these few senior ZESCO staff or appointees are going to cost the nation, one can’t only conclude that if they are not fired, it’s either because of political considerations (appointees who are party loyalist and cadres or issues of nepotism).
Zambia is today back again in the midst of an electricity or power supply crisis that will derail what is left of our ailing economy, this load shedding is hurting a lot of local businesses and has already destabilize our struggling members citizen who are the majority. Wait until month-end to see how many small and medium businesses will struggle to meet their payroll obligations, how about the petty traders who live from hand to mouth?
And the Zambia Consumer Association – ZACA has predicted a resultant high cost of basic essential commodities in the next few months from now because of escalated cost of production due to load shedding.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with the Zambian Business Times –ZBT, ZACA Executive Secretary Juba Sakala disclosed that the impact of load shedding is immense as businesses are now operating at half capacity. He said this entails that prices of products on the market will be higher as there is reduced supply due to the fact that some industries are now operating at half capacity because of the high cost of doing business (using more expensive power from high priced diesel generators) caused by high hours of load shedding.
Sakala said time and again Government have made decisions that have costed the local people and now we are in this situation because of the decisions that government made without looking at the future or considering local interests first. He added that government officials should not do things to please their masters. “Do not make policies to please your “master”, the one who is giving you money which could be probably the IMF or World Bank but consider the local people first when making decisions.”
“That’s why we are calling for them to completely ban exports so that they satisfy the local market and stabilize the production of essential commodities in the country.” He stressed.
“Look, we are in another wrong decision where people exporting power, were people misinformed the president and those people are still in offices and now we wonder what type of decisions are we going to be making day in day out to please the masters at the expense of taking decisions in the best interests local Zambians.”
Sakala added, “We are in this situation where production has gone down and people have no power for 12 hrs (even more hours of load shedding in some areas) because of some decisions that people made to please their masters and am quite disturbed with such decisions.”
